


Raise the Dead

by 0bviousLeigh



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Trans Pidge | Katie Holt, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone, this has probably been done a thousand times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 08:08:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9647480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0bviousLeigh/pseuds/0bviousLeigh
Summary: Katie felt like she had broken herself apart and put herself back together in the wrong order. The only thing that was holding her pieces together was her own rage and determination. She would find her father and brother. She would look into the eyes of the people who kept telling her that they were dead, and she would hold her tongue, but in her heart she would tell herself that she would just have to raise the dead.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song "Higher" by The Naked and Famous

Dad was the first to ask if everything was okay. Not in the tone of voice that most adults used when they talked to kids. Dad never used that kind of voice when he spoke.

“What’s on your mind, Pigeon?”

“I…I don’t feel right.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Caden mumbled, “I don’t think I’m…supposed to be a boy.”

It was something Caden had thought about a lot. In preschool, Caden watched the girls in his class and thought that he wanted to be more like them. He didn’t play with them, or with the boys. He just sat and watched, and wished.

Dad smiled. “Is that so?” He mused. “Well then, I guess we should do something about that.”

Dad talked to mom, and they both talked to Caden.

“What do you want to do to not be a boy?” Mom asked.

“I don’t want to dress like a boy,” Caden answered.

So mom went out, and came home with some skirts and dresses. Putting them on felt like…like getting into bed after a long day. Safe, comfortable, like everything would be okay.

“What else?” Dad asked.

“I want a different name,” Caden said.

Mom, dad, and Matt had already shortened ‘Caden’ to ‘Cady’ before, so they simply changed the spelling. Caden Holt became known as Katie Holt. Dad and mom told people that they had a son and a daughter. Matt told all his friends that he had a little sister now.

And Katie blossomed. Four years after her birth, she finally felt like she was a person. She became more outgoing, inquisitive, and eager. She had four years of life to catch up on, and she was determined to make the most of her new beginning.

 

* * *

 

Nine Years Later

 

“Are you excited to go to Kerberos?” Katie asked as she lounged on Matt’s bed.

“Excited?” Matt scoffed, “I’m on a different plane of existence!”

Katie grinned. “Bring me a sample of the ice too, okay?” She teased.

Matt returned her smile. “I bet you would do more with it than any scientist with the Garrison could.” He handed her paper back to her. “It’s amazing, but you already knew that.” He reached over the back of his computer chair to poke the top of Katie’s head. “My little sister, already going to college. I’m so proud.”

“If I get accepted,” Katie said, but she was glowing from the praise. She would beat Matt by a year if she got accepted to this program in the fall. She wanted to be an astronaut just like her brother and dad, and this school was the best place to learn the skills necessary to explore the furthest reaches of human technology. But of course, Katie would push that reach. She would stretch Earth’s reach beyond Kerberos, she knew it as well as her father knew it. Sometimes Katie wished out loud to join her father and Matt on the trip to Kerberos, just so she could listen to her father tell her about the adventures he knew she would have some day. Dad’s speeches were always the best.

“I can’t believe how young your pilot is,” Katie said as she pulled herself out of her thoughts. “How good is he?”

“The best pilot on Earth,” Matt said, “And possibly in the universe. Man, Katie, you should see him in the simulator. And on the flight we took to the moon? Dang, I’ve never been part of a more perfect landing in my entire time at the Garrison. This guy is the best of the best.”

“And when are you marrying him?” Katie asked.

Matt blushed bright red, snatched his pillow off the bed, and held it over Katie’s face. “Shut your pie-hole!” he screamed.

Katie shrieked with laughter, getting a mouthful of Matt’s pillow in the process, but it was worth it. They rolled off the bed and landed with a tremendous thud on the floor.

Dad called, “I know you two aren’t rough-housing right before both of your big days!”

Katie and Matt separated quickly and straightened their clothes and hair. “We’re not,” they chorused.

“Good,” Dad laughed, “Then come and have dinner!”

 

Katie and mom bid dad and Matt farewell from behind a panel of glass. The two of them had already gone through decontamination, and they couldn’t have any contact with the outside world from now on. On the other side of the room, the pilot was saying goodbye to his parents, while a teenage boy stood by. But Katie was barely paying attention to them. Dad and Matt were tapping out messages in code on the glass, and Katie was barely holding in her laughter.

‘I’m going on a space trip and I’m bringing amoebas, booger-filled tissues, Commander Iverson’s eye patch, drones, and…Electrodynamic tethers!’ Matt tapped out.

Katie bit her lip. Mom and Matt were playing too tamely. She had a good one for ‘G’.

Dad tapped that he was bringing Fuji Space School’s basketball mascot costume, which Katie had to admit was a good one, and a long one. But she had a long one, too. She went down the list and then tapped out,

‘Galaxy Garrison’s entire secret fighter fleet.’

Matt and dad couldn’t hold their laughter in on that one—the Galaxy Garrison’s secret fighter fleet was an enduring legend among students of the school, who always hear lore that a fleet of high-tech fighter jets were stationed under the school in the event of some kind of alien invasion. It was ludicrous, but on his first day at the Garrison, dad gave Matt a blurry picture of some fighter jets, and Matt passed it around the school as “proof” that he’d seen the fleet.

A voice over a loudspeaker signaled that it was time for the crew to board the ship. Katie pressed her hands to the glass and mouthed ‘I love you,’ to her dad and brother. She didn’t take her eyes off of them as they left the room.

She and her mom watched the spacecraft launch, and then mom drove Katie to her college interview. Katie wanted to reread her speech, but she kept looking out the window, at the trails of smoke that still marked the path the rocket had taken.

“They’ll be fine,” Mom said, reaching over to pat Katie’s knee. “We’ll see them again soon, and by then, you’ll be preparing for college.”

 

But that wasn’t what happened at all.

 

Katie woke up at midnight, knowing that something was wrong. She left her room and nearly collided with her mother as she raced down the hall, down the stairs, and to the living room.

“No, no, no,” mom moaned. “No, it can’t be true.”

Katie looked towards her parents’ room, and she walked into it. Her mom’s phone lay on the bed, and Katie could hear a voice calling, “Mrs. Holt? Please, Mrs. Holt, we are so sorry…”

Katie snatched the phone up. “What?” She demanded.

The voice paused. “Mrs…Holt?”

“Repeat what you just said,” Katie demanded, her heart in her throat.

“We…we regret to inform you that we have lost contact with the Kerberos team. We believe that the ship crashed due to pilot error.”

Katie’s blood ran cold. “You’re wrong,” she snapped.

“Mrs. Holt, please,” the voice begged, “We have been trying to make contact for hours, we must break the news. We will send representatives to you in the morning but until then…”

Katie hung up the phone. She would know if her father and brother had died, wouldn’t she? She would have felt it, if something was wrong.

She ran down the stairs, stopping halfway as she saw the light from the TV, and a breaking news alert was flashing on the screen. Mom was curled on the sofa, the remote clutched in her shaking hand.

“The Kerberos mission has been reported to have been lost.”

Katie’s eyes filled with tears—angry tears. Pilot Error. It was impossible, Matt and dad would never have gone on a mission if they didn’t believe in their team 100%. Matt said that the pilot was the best one he’d ever worked with.

“It is truly a sad day for humanity.”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE LYING!” Katie screeched.

Mom jumped and turned around. Her face was white as bone, and she was shaking. “K-Katie, I d-didn’t hear you,” she stammered.

Katie raced down the rest of the stairs, and she hugged her mother. “It’s not true,” she said vehemently. “Mom, you know it isn’t. They’re not gone, they can’t be gone. We would know, we would have felt it.”

Mom clutched Katie and sobbed. Katie swallowed past a lump in her throat.

“It’s okay, mom,” she said. She wouldn’t cry for her father and brother. They weren’t dead.

At dawn, mom finally stopped crying. She walked around the house in a daze, washing dishes that were already clean, picking things up and putting them down in the exact same places. Katie couldn’t bear to watch it, so she went to her room, turned on her computer, and started reading. Already, the internet was buzzing with the news of the Kerberos failure. And like Katie, many people didn’t believe it.

‘The timing is off,’ one person wrote, ‘How could they have crashed today when the ship should have landed at least 24 hours ago, if it was running the maximum amount of time off schedule?’

‘The team checked in last week, they were totally on time, hell, they should have landed forty eight hours ago!’ Another person had responded.

‘I smell something fishy,’ Yet another wrote.

Katie opened apps and programs. She would work out this timeline, she would test these theories, she would get proof that she was being lied to.

 

Katie worked out the timeline. The ship couldn’t have crashed when the Garrison said it did, because it should have been sitting stationary on the ground while the crew prepared to leave to collect their ice samples. Katie presented this evidence to the Garrison representatives who came to her house, but they weren’t interested.

“We understand this is hard,” they simpered, looking at Katie pityingly. “Denial is part of grief. But the fact remains, the ship crashed.”

“It can’t have!” Katie screamed. “I did the math, I’m not wrong, it’s impossible!”

One of the representatives handed mom a card. “This is an excellent grief counselor, perhaps you and your daughter—”

Katie grabbed the card and ripped it into shreds. “GET OUT OF OUR HOUSE!” She yelled. When the idiots didn’t move, she grabbed the poker from the living room fireplace and waved it in their faces.

“VACATE. THE. PREMISES,” Katie demanded.

This time, they listened.

 

Katie missed Matt and dad’s funeral. She was sneaking into the Galaxy Garrison to hack their computer.

At first, Katie was furious with her mom for having a funeral. Then, mom dragged Katie to the window and pointed at the closed blinds.

“They are watching us, Katie,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

Katie peered between the blinds. An unmarked car sat across the street.

“That car has been there for days,” mom said. “It follows me to the store, it followed me to the funeral home. Katie, they want to make sure we don’t cause trouble.” She leaned in close. “I suspect they bugged the house when they came.”

Mom’s eyes were clear and fierce. Katie believed her. She created a device to sweep for bugs, and she found one under the dining room chair, where the Garrison representatives had sat.

“Leave it,” mom whispered to Katie in the upstairs bathroom. The facet was turned on. “If we destroy it, they’ll find a way to plant another. We only speak in the bathroom upstairs, with the water running. Do you understand me?”

Katie nodded. “Mom…what do we do?”

“We keep faith,” mom said. “And we use our heads.”

So while mom grieved over empty caskets, Katie snuck into the Galaxy Garrison. It was too easy to get passed the guards, slip through the hallways, and into the main office. The first thing she did was email herself the most recent photos of Kerberos. As she suspected, there was no evidence of a crash.

Katie tried to quell her fury, but it rose in her body, consuming her like a fire. Her anger surprised her, she had already suspected these lies, why was she so angry when confronted with the evidence?

Because these people were supposed to stand for discovery. They were supposed to be the leaders of space exploration, and they were blatantly lying not just to all of humanity, but to the people who, out of everyone, deserved to know the truth. So that begged the question—if the ship hadn’t crashed, where the hell was it?

Katie began looking. She found dozens of classified files and sent them to her computer back home, working quickly to ensure that nobody would be able to trace the path the files were taking, ensuring that no one would even suspect that the files had been sent in the first place. The room was dark and the computer was bright, and Katie’s eyes burned, but she refused to even blink. Anything she thought could be even remotely helpful, she sent straight to her home computer. She didn’t know how long she had until—

The light flipped on. Commander Iverson stood in front of her, furious.

“Escort Miss Holt off the premises, and tell the guards that she’s not allowed back on the property.”

Katie’s fury boiled over. She thrashed in the arms of the guard holding her. “You can’t stop me! I’ll find the truth, I’ll never stop looking!” She screamed.

When she was escorted outside, Katie spit on the ground in front of the Garrison. She would be back, that was for sure. One way or another, she was going to come back here. She was sure, this place had the answers she was looking for.

 

At home, Katie read through the files she had stolen, hardly able to believe what she was reading.

There was no trace of the Kerberos crew, or their ship. Apparently it had, indeed landed on the moon. There were transcripts of the crew’s radio transmissions to mission control, even of their conversations with each other.

_Samuel Holt: I tell you Takashi, Katie’s going to make history some day. She’s going to surpass everyone that’s come before her. I won’t be surprised if her name is remembered before my own._

Katie was devastated. She was furious. And she was honored. Her father had said all of those words to her before, but knowing that he had said them to someone who didn’t even know her, he bragged about her even when he was in flight to the farthest reaches of human technology…he was truly proud of her. Katie had to wonder if his faith in her had been misplaced. Her father and brother had been missing for nearly a month, and all Katie had was pictures of an undamaged moon, and a transcript of a conversation that ended in Takashi Shirogane screaming for her father and brother to run.

What were they running from? The Garrison’s top secret files read that they had detected the presence of something huge on the moon, something so technologically advanced, their sonar and radio wave readers couldn’t even guess what it had been. One theory was that it had been extraterrestrial life.

Katie’s father and brother had been abducted by aliens.

If it was true, it was the most significant scientific event in history. It meant that humans were not alone in the universe, and it meant that, since the crew had not been heard from since, whatever took them was likely hostile.

On the one hand, Katie could see why the Garrison didn’t want it becoming public knowledge that they had no idea what had become of the Kerberos crew. But why hide it from the families of the crew? Why lead them to believe that their loved ones were dead when there was a possibility that it wasn’t true?

Katie knew that the Garrison had those answers. There was no way Commander Iverson didn’t know about this. Katie needed to know more, but she would never get back on Garrison property if she went as Katie Holt.

So Katie went to her mom.

“I can’t be Katie anymore,” she said. “I need to get into the Garrison, and I can’t do that as Katie.”

 

It took a lot of work to disappear. Katie Holt bought a plane ticket to Paris, and her mother told everyone that Katie was going to go spend some time with family living abroad, that it would be good for her to get away from the states. Mom drove Katie to the airport. She had two suitcases, a one way ticket, and a plan. Katie hugged her mother, and the tears in her eyes weren’t fake as she said goodbye. Her mother’s arms were strong and firm around her shoulders, her eyes fierce as she wished Katie good luck.

Katie Holt had a ticket for Paris. But she had no intention of using it. It wasn’t Katie Holt who walked up to the check in counter, it was Pidge Gunderson, and he was flying to California.

 

It was beyond easy to forge the passport, birth certificate, and get a fake social security number. The hardest part had been picking a fake name, a name that Katie could respond to, but wouldn’t raise suspicion for being too close to Katie Holt.

It took Katie a week to create someone else, but ensuring that the Galaxy Garrison would stop looking for Katie Holt, well, that was something else entirely. It was why Katie needed to go to the airport, why she couldn’t go home, why she had to change who she was.

She settled on ‘Pidge’ as a first name for the nickname her father had given her, Pigeon.

“Why Pigeon?” Katie had asked many years ago.

“When you were learning to walk, you would bob your head like a little Pigeon,” dad had said. “Matt was Elephant when he was a baby, because he would put his bottle in his mouth and hold it there while he crawled. I could never get away with calling him that after he turned four, but you’ve never seemed to mind being my little Pigeon.”

And Katie hadn’t minded. She chose Gunderson as her last name because it sounded like Garrison, she figured that would be an easy thing to respond to.

She figured that every time someone called her Pidge Gunderson, she would be reminded of why she was doing this, why she had turned herself into someone, something, she had never wanted to be in the first place.

 

No one in the airport had looked at Pidge oddly for having long hair when he was supposed to be a boy, but Katie knew that her hair would have to go eventually.

Upon landing in California, Katie checked into a hotel room. She check for the twentieth time that all her documents were in order. Pidge Gunderson had exemplary scores on all his tests, he was accepted for training as a communications specialist, Katie has Pidge’s room key for the Garrison dorms, his acceptance letter, his school uniforms, and an old pair of Matt’s glasses to further hide her face. The only thing Katie didn’t have was the haircut the Pidge had in his ID photo. Pidge photoshopped that haircut onto a photo of herself, it’s from an old picture of Matt. The haircut is what she’s dreading the most.

It was already hard turning into a boy when she had renounced that gender nine years ago. She’d never had sexual reassignment surgery, that had been something she wasn’t sure she wanted. Ironically, it would probably end up being her saving grace through all of this. The estrogen pills she took to prevent facial hair and other secondary male sex traits weren’t enough to give her breasts, so she didn’t need to wear a binder or even, really, a bra. She wouldn’t stop taking those. In her heart, Katie would still be Katie, the girl she knew she was, but outwardly…

Katie remembered when her hair was finally long enough for clips and bows, and braids and ponytails. She had been so excited. Now she finally had “girl hair”! Of course, she knew girls could have short hair, but so many of the beautiful women that she had looked up to had long, beautiful hair. It was an aspect of femininity that persisted, and Katie had always loved her long hair, loved twirling it around her finger, loved styling it with headbands and other accessories. But it was time to say goodbye to all of that.

She could have gone to a salon to have it cut, but she couldn’t stand the idea of someone else taking away this part of her identity. She had already lost so much—her brother and father, her trust in the world, the freedom to go home without fear of being spied on—she wasn’t going to allow someone else to take her hair.

So Katie picked up the scissors, and grabbed a lock of her hair. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and cut. She thought the first cut would be the hardest, but it didn’t get any easier as she continued to snip away.

When it was done, Katie gathered the strands of hair into a bundle and put it in an envelope. She would send it to a wigs for cancer patients charity, so at least something would come of her sacrifice. It felt weird, having short hair. She would keep running her fingers through it, searching for that extra weight, but it was gone. She would have to get used to it quickly, if she wanted to blend in.

She went into shopping malls and forced herself to use the men’s restrooms, over and over until it was second nature to her, bypassing the ladies’ room. She repeated her new name to herself.

“I am Pidge Gunderson.”

Over, and over, and over, until she didn’t flinch, until she felt no pain, no betrayal. Until she killed any and all negative reaction.

She was miserable, but two weeks later when she finally got to walk through the doors of the Galaxy Garrison, right past the very security guards that had once been told to keep her out at all costs, she felt a glimmer of hope. She was still miserable, but her anger was back.

Katie felt like she had broken herself apart and put herself back together in the wrong order. The only thing that was holding her pieces together was her own rage and determination. She would find her father and brother. She would look into the eyes of the people who kept telling her that they were dead, and she would hold her tongue, but in her heart she would tell herself that she would just have to raise the dead.

If Katie had to become a boy, if she had to face lying commanders, if she had to take on the entire goddamn universe to get her father and brother back, then she would do it. Nobody could stop her.

**Author's Note:**

> " When the idiots didn’t move, she grabbed the poker from the living room fireplace and waved it in their faces. “VACATE. THE. PREMISES,” Katie demanded. "
> 
> I dare you to tell me that you can't see Pidge doing just that.


End file.
